Robin rolls his eyes, knowing he’s going to lose, but agrees anyway. They choose rough gray rocks the same size and weight. “On the count of three.”
Scott’s rock soars high, but Robin pitches his from the side, sending it straight and fast. It plunks into the brown water more than a foot beyond Scott’s.
“Two out of three,” Scott says, shuffling away, searching for another rock.
“No way,” Robin says. He plants himself in front of Scott. “I won.”
“OK. What?” Scott says.
Robin looks around and, finding no one else in sight, grabs Scott’s shoulders and pulls his face in for a kiss. Scott is stiff in his grasp, but his mouth remains neutral, neither tightening in resistance nor parting for more. Breath escapes Scott’s nose in jittery puffs that land on Robin’s upper lip. He’s just waiting for it to be over, Robin thinks, but when he opens his eyes—he doesn’t even remember closing them—Scott’s are closed, too. He seems sort of lost in it. Robin adds the slightest pressure to his lips, waits for Scott to respond, for his lips to soften; he does, they do. Little by little, moving in millimeters, the kiss expands. Robin’s hands slide to Scott’s waist. Scott does the same, pushing his fingers under the waist of Robin’s pants, pushing his belly and hips into Robin.
The outside world intrudes—some rumbling sound, just a truck on a nearby road, but it’s enough to pull them apart. Nothing is said. Robin fights back the grin that wants to take hold of his face. Scott wipes his lips. They don’t meet each other’s eyes.
Scott resumes throwing rocks into the pond though there is no more talk of contests. Hours tick by, silent but for the occasional splashes. They sit so that their hips and shoulders touch, close but not too close. Robin is bursting with wanting more, but he lets himself rest on the small victory of kissing Scott. They lean back, curl up against the rocks, and let sleep take over.
When they wake to the setting sun, the spell has worn thin. The night’s dropping temperature demands a decision, and Scott, sure that his father is either too drunk to remember what happened or has passed out, decides to go home. Before he leaves, he coaches Robin on what to say to his parents: “I don’t know what got into me. I can’t explain it. I’m sorry.” He says it’s the safest bet.
Robin spends the three dollars Scott gave him on food and Asteroids at Jerry’s Pizza in town, then nurses a Coke for an hour. He imagines his mother storming in to Jerry’s and finding him moping in this red vinyl booth, taking one look and accusing him of feeling sorry for himself. He imagines his father’s anger, this new anger that never existed before Jackson’s injury, exploding again. Maybe this time he really will get hit. He thinks about sneaking into the house while they are out visiting Jackson, then gets a better idea.
He hops back on his bike and rides to the hospital, arriving before visiting hours are over. As he had hoped, his parents are there. No matter what they say to him, he repeats some version of what Scott advised, and nothing more. It seems to work. He is sternly lectured in the hospital cafeteria and in the car all the way home and again back at the house. His father repeatedly tells him he is selfish, inconsiderate, thoughtless; his mother voices her confusion and disapproval at his rebellion; together they spell out a list of prohibitions: no socializing, no hike rides, no unnecessary phone call, But the impact is much softer than he suspects it would have been had he not chosen to return to them at Jackson’s bedside, where kind-faced nurses were coming and going and the fragile pulse of medical machinery droned eerily all around them.
Chapter Nine
His father has bought the Time-Life home improvement books, and he spends every night after dinner engrossed in them, scrawling notations and inky sketches on a lined pad. Clark’s enthusiasm builds each day. Soon all he can talk about is renting equipment and taking measurements and which tools he needs, and how it all has to happen quickly because the weather is getting colder. Robin feels the pressure of the project increasing every day, sees the way it is becoming an obsession. Clark comes into his room at night—Robin is, at last, sleeping in his own bed again—with enthusiastic updates on pricing and specs and the latest details of the schedule. Robin tries to feign interest in the hopes of avoiding conflict for a while, but in the back of his mind he can’t shake the idea that it is only a matter of time before something derails this project. He can tell that his mother does not believe in Clark’s do-it-yourself project either, but she has not voiced objections. Instead she spends long hours each day at the hospital, making her way through a stack of novels—all her favorites, pulled off dusty shelves. This week it’s Anna Karenina, which she summarizes for Robin in a dark and brooding manner.
Over the next ten days, their backyard transforms, with bags of cement mix and lumber and supplies piling up under heavy gray tarps. The dining room furniture is carried to the basement, and the carpet is covered with a dropcloth. Finally, one Saturday, Uncle Stan and one of his loping, beer-bellied friends—a so-called contractor—show up with a strange battering tool and proceed to smash away half of the wall.
Robin stands in the living room during the demolition, at the side of his mother, who is sipping whiskey, her face registering shock at the cacophony of breaking plaster and splintering wood. This assault on the senses is worsened by the triumphant hoots of Larry, who has come along to witness the spectacle. Robin is astonished how easy it is to knock down a wall. Don’t walls keep everything else in place? As the plaster dust clears, he stares through the hole, half expecting the ceiling to collapse down upon them, the house retaliating against this injury they have inflicted upon it.
The next day, construction comes to an early halt when his father realizes he’s ordered too little lumber and must drive across the state line to find a hardware store open on Sunday. Robin, covered in sawdust and perspiration, plops down at the kitchen table with his mother and Aunt Corinne. They’re listening to the oldies station, WCBS, humming along with doo-wop and Motown and British Invasion tunes. Corinne was his mother’s friend before she married Stan, and every song seems to raise memories of those days before marriage and children. Robin watches Aunt Corinne mouth the words to a Connie Francis song as a large Pisces medallion on a chain bounces between her breasts.
“Oh, God,” Dorothy says suddenly, “this song reminds me of Seymour. Remember?”
Corinne rolls her eyes. “How could I forget? It’s not like you had any other beaus like him.”
“Who’s Seymour?” Robin asks.
Corinne looks down as if she’s embarrassed. Dorothy says, “Oh, Corinne, for God’s sake. It’s not such a damn scandal.”
“Who’s Seymour?” Robin repeats.
“He was very nice,” Corinne says. “I always said, Seymour had a very nice way about him.”
Dorothy frowns sarcastically and mimics, “A very nice way about him. For God’s sake, Corinne, that’s like a mother describing her ugly daughter as having a nice personality.”
“Dottie, it is not. That’s not what I meant. I liked Seymour.”
“When did you go out with him?” Robin asks.
Dorothy gives him a very adult look. “He was my last boyfriend before your father.”
“It wasn’t very long,” Corinne interjects. “Really, Dottie. It was only—what? A month or two?”
“It was seven weeks, to be exact. A very interesting seven weeks.”
Corinne pours herself some tea. “God, that summer was so hot.”
“It was the worst. Ninety percent humidity every day.”
“That’s the summer we went to Fire Island. Remember, you, me, Tatjana, Jan, and Sue Benedict. And that was the summer Seymour came to visit.”
“And practically moved in,” Dorothy says.
“That was a scandal, Dottie. It really was. The way people talked.”
A nice way about him. Fire Island. Scandal. Robin adds it up: Seymour sounded like a queer. He begins to blurt out the question. “Was Seymour—” and then cuts himself off, not wanting to utter the wo
rd, not wanting to meet his mother’s eyes with queer hanging in the air. Instead he stammers, “Um, was he, um, black?”
Dorothy looks at him, surprised. Pleased. Her delighted smile tells him that he’s stumbled upon the right answer; she thinks he has been astute. After all the yelling and the chaos that has taken over the house for the past few weeks, he is immensely relieved for this single look of approval. Even if he has impressed her by accident.
“Yes, Robin. He was black, and more than that”—she pauses for dramatic effect—“he was a bartender.”
Dorothy and Corinne look at each other and then burst into laughter. Corinne gets up and turns down the radio; as she passes Robin and notices his confused look, she brushes him on the head. “That’s what your mother said to us—she said, ‘I don’t know why everybody is in a tizzy about him being black. I can’t believe that I’m dating a bartender.’ ” She disappears into the living room. A moment later a Fifth Dimension album starts up on the turntable.
Dorothy takes Robin’s hand. “You have to understand, where I grew up, high school boys wound up working as bartenders in the Amherst and Holyoke college bars. It was such a rouge thing to me. Of course, I was just being a snob, but it had that resonance to it. Low-life Yankee trash working in small town bars. But Seymour, you see, was a bartender at the Hotel Taft. It was very glamorous. His family was in Harlem, and they ran a ladies boutique on 125th Street. He was more middle class than I was.”
“So why did you break up with him?”
“Yes, dear, it was I who dumped him,” she says, offering another smile for his precociousness. “But really, he was a big drinker. Or should I say, I was a big drinker when I was with him. We went out and drank, we stayed at each other’s apartments and drank. That month on Fire Island I was tipsy the entire time Seymour was visiting, which was about half of that month.”
“Why did he make you drink?”
“We just drank together. Neither of us made the other drink. It was just . . . part of the way we were together.” Her voice has a perplexed quality to it, as if she still can’t solve the essential puzzle of their relationship.
Corinne has been leaning against the doorframe. She speaks up now. “Robin, you probably don’t know this because of your age, but this used to be a much more prejudiced country to live in.”
“Still seems pretty prejudiced to me,” Robin says. “I mean, all the black kids in lunch sit at a separate table. I have this black friend, George, in my science class, and even though we have the same lunch period and everything, we never sit together. He sits with these other black kids—some of them he doesn’t even like, and this one girl, Debra, who nobody likes. You know what I mean?”
Dorothy frowns, “Forgive me for nagging dear, but please don’t end your statements with you know what I mean. It’s so very New Jersey. ”
“Oh, Mom. Come on. I’m just saying—”
“I’m just saying,” Dorothy repeats. She picks at some food on her plate and continues, her voice at once annoyed and regretful. “I remember that day I told Seymour I couldn’t see him anymore. It was not one of the lovelier moments of my Single Girl Escapades, let me tell you. He was just crestfallen. But what was I supposed to do? We couldn’t get married.”
“Did Nana ever meet him? Or Uncle Stan?” Robin asks, wanting the picture filled out, not completely understanding why she wouldn’t have married someone she loved, no matter the circumstances.
“No, no, no,” Dorothy says quickly. “It was much less Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner? than it was Another Country.”
“What’s that?”
“A very wonderful, very scandalous novel. Baldwin wrote it—James Baldwin. When you’re old enough I’ll let you read that one.”
“Why can’t I read it now?”
Dorothy sighs and rubs her temples. “Robin, you may be mature for your age but I don’t think you’re quite an adult yet. Maybe when you’re sixteen or seventeen.”
“You always say that.”
“I’m your mother, Robin. I’m older than you. Trust me.”
“Trust me,” Robin repeats sarcastically.
“Ahem,” Corinne says. “Time out.”
“Sorry,” Dorothy says. “Guess I’m still a wee bit tense about it after all these years. About Seymour. I knew I should have seen an analyst when I was twenty-one. A little head shrinking back then and I’m sure I would have had a much more gracious life.”
Corinne pats Dorothy’s hand. “Well, it all turned out fine, anyway, Dottie, because you met Clark just after that, and here we are today.”
“Here we are today, indeed,” Dorothy says, standing up and busying herself suddenly at the sink. “Here we are,” she repeats, bitterly.
Corinne says, “Oh, sweetie, don’t be like that. Things are going to work out. It will be a struggle, but it will work out, Dottie. It just will. Whatever happens, it will work out.”
Watching his mother scrubbing dishes, Robin is overcome with pity for her, living all these years knowing she could have had another life, a life that she was denied, that she denied herself. He gets up and wraps his arms around her from behind, feels her stop what she’s doing and stiffen. She does not turn around, and she does not say anything. He wants her to face him and hug him back, to let him share her memory of lost love, to let it be their moment. But when it becomes clear that she won’t, he lets go. For the rest of the day, this small denial stays with him, gnawing away the pity he felt for her and replacing it with the stirrings of contempt.
At least once a day since Maggio’s party, Robin takes a trip down the corridor where Todd’s locker is. A couple of times a week his timing is usually right, and if Todd isn’t with anyone else, he says hello to him, and sometimes Todd nods back. Not much more than that ever happens, but Robin keeps at it with the regularity of someone stoking a slow-burning fire.
And then one morning, during a fire drill that empties the student body onto the school’s front lawn, he catches sight of him a few yards away. He calls to him excitedly, but Todd continues walking, dragging along a girl whose hand rests in his back pocket.
Robin catches up to them, wanting an acknowledgment at the least. “Hey, Todd, wait up.”
“Yo,” Todd says.
“Where you going so fast?” Robin asks. “I mean, ha-ha, where’s the fire?” He raises his eyebrows, hoping his joke will at least register.
Todd’s face remains uninterested. “Debbie’s car is over there,” he says, pointing toward the parking lot.
Robin stops and lets them pass, feeling foolish. He hears Debbie ask, “Who was that kid?” but he doesn’t hear Todd’s reply, and it makes him queasy to guess what Todd might be saying.
As he watches them move toward the parking lot, he imagines that he has planted a bomb in Debbie’s car and that when the key turns in the ignition the two of them, Todd and this girl he flaunts like a trophy, are blown sky high.
As the construction takes over the house in fits and starts—each evening bringing not only a new addition to the previous day’s work but an accompanying new dilemma, which his father, invariably, cannot quite solve—Robin finds himself increasingly on the edge of exploding. When he wakes up in the morning and sees the varnish filings under his fingernails, reminding him that he has been scratching like a cat at his headboard throughout the night, it fills him with such a rage that before he knows it he’s punching his fists into his pillow and imagining it’s his father, his Uncle Stan, his cousin Larry, the most recent jerk at school to bully him. He wants to hurt someone. Someone has to pay, he thinks and then later feels guilty, as if his very thoughts are the problem. One morning when he’s punching his pillow he sees his mother’s face at the end of his fist, and it frightens him so deeply he freezes like a zombie.
He jerks off every morning, every night, sometimes after school as well if no one is home. He flexes his arms, sucks in his stomach, blanks out his expression in front of the bathroom mirror until he can see the image of a virile you
ng man instead of his own soft body—and then he makes his dick hard and lets his mind travel through its landscape of men and boys, faces and bodies, real and imagined sex, what he has known and what he still wants. He always aims his semen into the bathtub or the sink or the toilet, somewhere to wash away the evidence.
At school he is adrift. Even his favorite subjects—English, social studies—have ceased to interest him at all. One night, after receiving a C on an English test and then getting yelled at by his father while his mother, midway through another wine binge, looked on silently, he sits on the edge of his bed, unable to sleep. The scraped-away spot on his headboard glows in the moonlight—the evidence of his tormented mind leering at him. He goes to the bathroom and instead of jerking off brings a fingernail clipper back to his bed, where he chops at the soft tips of his nails until anything that looks like excess is gone. Then he runs his nails over the board and examines them for spots where the varnish has caught. He cuts at these places, which are clearly not yet trim enough, and then he cuts a little bit more just to be sure, and then tries to make all of them even, including the rough skin at their edges, and then he examines his work again. One nail is tinged at its edge with blood. He snips away at the skin near the cut, wanting to clear the area around the wound, but that just allows it to bleed more freely. He sucks on the blood—he has a dim memory of licking Jackson’s blood off his own fingertip when he was with him at the playground right after the fall. Then he snips down on another and another, taking his time. He calmly chops away until most of his fingertips are bleeding, the newly peeled nail beds throbbing from exposure, the fingers themselves almost numb. The pain is small compared to the relief he feels that he will sleep better and that he will now, somehow, be safe from the demons that haunt his dreams.
Robin mixes salad dressing with a fork, watching the red vinegar break into droplets in the golden oil and spin like bubbles trapped in a surf. He pours the combination over a bowl of iceberg lettuce and sliced tomatoes oozing green, larval seeds. He scrapes grated raw carrot on top, followed by cucumber slices and the onion he’s minced so small it looks like a mound of wet, crystalline sand. He’s sure Ruby won’t eat any of his salad but he’s gone ahead and made it anyway, simply because he likes putting it together. The two of them are having dinner alone tonight. Clark and Dorothy are at school, meeting with Mr. Cortez. Every time Robin thinks of the three of them sitting in Mr. Cortez’s office, his temples throb: at this minute decisions are being made about him. It feels like a lesser version of what he’s been doing all the time lately, waiting for news about Jackson. In both cases he only expects to hear something bad.
The World of Normal Boys Page 21
